Starting with your arrows, you're definitely drawing these with a great deal of confidence, which generally helps to establish how the structures push through the world with a stronger sense of fluidity - but there is a certain amount of erraticness to how you've drawn them which undermines that somewhat. For the most part you're on the right track here, but I think you need to put a little bit more time and consideration behind each stroke, and in how you intend for the resulting arrow to actually flow. Right now it seems like you're jumping straight in without as much thought, which is getting you most of the way there, but does result in less consistency.

In other words, you're doing well, but put a little bit more time into the planning phase and you'll do even better.

Moving into the leaves, unfortunately I'm not seeing the same level of confidence being invested into the earlier stages of construction, where we establish the flow line and the basic footprint of the overall leaf. Those early stages serve to establish not only how the leaves are to sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.

Additionally, your linework is quite erratic, resulting - at least in some places - in a lot of repeated strokes (like here and here), where you're very much deviating from the key principles of markmaking from Lesson 1. As a whole it does seem like you've slipped back towards rough sketching, and looking ahead to your plant constructions, that definitely continues to be the case there.

You're also very prone to zigzagging your edge detail back and forth, or otherwise leaving fairly loose relationships between the phases of construction. This is something that is present somewhat in your leaves here, but overwhelmingly in your later plant constructions.

I suspect the issue comes down to one thing - your focus here appears to be primarily on creating detailed, visually pleasing drawings, and so you're working towards that goal instead of the goals the course itself sets out for you. Every drawing we do here is an exercise - and so, the way in which they're approached, and how consistently you hold to the principles from the previous lessons impacts how effectively the exercise helps you develop the targeted skills.

This focus on creating something detailed in the end appears to influence the entire process that precedes the detail stage as well. It is not entirely uncommon to have students who think ahead to all of the detail they want to add, causing them to rush through the previous stages - when it is those previous stages that provide the solid scaffolding upon which the construction exists, and without it, the whole drawing falls apart.

When you do get into the detail phase, you appear to be heavily focused on the general idea of decoration - that is, doing what you can to make those drawings more visually pleasing, often reaching for reasons to put more marks down, as more marks leads to more visual complexity. Unfortunately, decoration is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which one has added "enough" decoration, and so it leaves us grasping in the dark without a sense of what we're grasping for.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

One last thing before we move on from this - texture, as discussed back in Lesson 2, is all about establishing cast shadows to help imply the presence of the textural forms, without explicitly drawing the forms themselves. Right now you're painting your textural marks on one stroke at a time. Instead, I'd recommend that you get in the habit of drawing your textural marks in two steps, first outlining them, then filling them in. This process, which you can see demonstrated in this updated video about the tools we use in this course, specifically where we talk about brush pens (I've timestamped the link to that section), forces us to think more about how a given shadow shape is to be designed. That design is derived entirely from our understanding of how that given textural form sits in space, and how it relates to its surrounding surfaces. That understanding is pulled from the reference image - but as explained here, the cast shadows themselves are not. Those are invented based on our understanding.

Continuing onto your branches, you've handled these fairly well. I have just two recommendations:

• When drawing a subsequent edge segment, try and use the last chunk of the previous one as a runway, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards the next goal, as shown here. This will make things a little more difficult, because it means you have to account for any mistakes in the previous stroke, but this also forces us to learn from those mistakes going forward.

• Remember that the degree of the ellipse shifts based on how the cylindrical structure itself turns in space. A basic rule of thumb (though this is impacted by how that tube turns in the world) is that as we slide farther away from the viewer along the cylindrical structure, the ellipses get wider. If you're unsure as to why this is, you can review the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

Now, continuing onto your plant constructions, what I've already mentioned largely stands - you're neglecting the basic principles of markmaking from Lesson 1, and have rushed into sketching more loosely. Unfortunately this does mean that you're going to have to fully redo the lesson in its entirety - but I'm going to provide some additional suggestions for your next attempt:

• Constructional drawing is at its core about maintaining tight, specific relationships between the different phases of construction. Each step defines a decision being made, or the solution to a problem, and every subsequent step must adhere to the marks we put down previously. If our marks do not come out as we intend, we end up deviating from the reference image - and we must hold to that deviation. Correcting it will merely result in contradictions being present in our drawings. That is also why we have to make a point to think first, and the ghosting method's planning phase gives us plenty of opportunity to do so.

• The above point manifests in a number of ways. One of them being something I already mentioned - the tendency to zigzag your edge detail back and forth across the previous stage of construction's edge. This is present throughout your work, although it tends to get muddled with the sketchy lines. The flower at the bottom right of this page gives us an example of a case where you weren't especially sketchy in your approach, making the zigzagging stand out more prominently.

• Additionally, we can see this in how the petals of many of your flowers are drawn. You have a tendency to leave arbitrary gaps between the end of your flow line and the end of the corresponding petals, and in cases where you use ellipses to define how far out a set of petals will extend (similarly to how we approached the hibiscus demo), these should be treated as decisions being made - and thus each flow line should extend right to the perimeter of the given ellipse. Every step is a decision, and every subsequent step heeds that decision.

• Remember the degree shift I talked about in regards to your branches, when constructing any cylindrical structures, like the flower pot for this aloe vera. It would result in the base of the pot being of a wider degree.

Now, I fully understand that this feedback is undoubtedly discouraging, but I can tell you this: you are not without skill. In fact, throughout your work here, I can see plenty of signs that, had you attempted to hold to the principles from the earlier lessons, you likely would have done very well. It's not that you tried to do something and then failed - it's that you tried to do something entirely different - and thus, I cannot judge you against the standards of the lesson. Of course, I could have cancelled and refunded your submission and asked you to redo it without any feedback beyond "you're not following the principles from the previous lessons" but I decided it would be preferable to give you the feedback anyway.

We all take wrong turns here and there. Of course, those wrong turns have their costs. They cost you the time of completing this homework, and the price of two credits. And they've cost me the time of writing a lengthy critique that certainly could have been avoided, had more care been taken on your part. Keep that in mind as you tackle this lesson again.